Lovecraft’s influence over 20 th century horror, supernatural and science fiction is vast, with symbols from his work spread out across popular culture, from death metal and Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen to Scooby Doo and Gravity Falls. There are at least half a dozen books in print claiming to be the real Necronomicon of the ‘Mad Arab’ alchemist and necromancer Abdul Alhazred – another of Lovecraft’s inventions. His ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ is pored over like a religious text, with references to it in Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law and The Satanic Rituals by Anton LaVey and Michael A. Devotees of Lovecraft tend to be as encyclopaedic as he was, and several academics have forged successful careers out of interpreting his work, life, and letters.

In fact, you almost certainly know it better than I do. If you know Lovecraft’s fiction, there’s nothing you need from me. LovecraftĪ blasted heath where nothing grows yet dead trees seem strangely animated an abandoned well that glows with a colour that has no name a disastrous expedition to Antarctica written by a survivor only to warn others to stay away cathedral-sized buildings from before the dawn of mankind where the geometry doesn’t make sense a pulp writer found dead at his desk, a look of frozen horror on his face sailors discover a drowned city and half a world away an artist begins to sculpt a hideous figure while an architect goes mad something not quite human breaks into an academic library to steal an unholy book human brains are removed and placed in cannisters for transport to other worlds the dead scream and a doctor vanishes alien gods, ancient and terrible, dream beneath the sea… Enter, if you dare, the weird world of H.P. ‘A Literature of Cosmic Fear’: An Introduction to H.P.

Rat in the wall lovecraft